Gwendolyn Hyslop – författare

Bordering Tibetan Languages: Making and Marking Languages in Transnational High Asia examines the complex interactions between state, ethnic, and linguistic borders in the Himalayas. These case studies from Bhutan, China, India, and Nepal show how people in the Himalayas talk borders into existence, and also how those borders speak to them and their identities. These ‘talking borders’ exist in a world where state borders are contested, and which is being irrevocably transformed by rapid social and economic change. This book offers a new perspective on this dynamic region by centring language, and in doing so, also offers new ways of thinking about how borders and language influence each other.

A grammar of Kurtöp is the first descriptive grammar of Kurtöp, a threatened language of Bhutan, and the only reference grammar of any East Bodish language. The East Bodish languages are a relatively unstudied branch of the larger Tibeto-Burman family, situated in Bhutan and neighbouring regions in Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh. The chapters introduce the language and the people who speak in a historical context and then go on to detail the synchronic and diachronic phonology, discuss word classes and cause structure, morphosyntax and syntax, and illustrate rich system of evidentiality and related categories. The book will be of interest to Tibeto-Burmanists, historical linguists and those interested in the prehistory of the eastern Himalayas, and to typologists.